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Want to write in Bengali? Google now offers transliteration service from several Indian languages including Bengali. Visit http://google.com/transliterate and set up the language to Bengali using the drop down menu on the upper left corner. Then start typing in Bangla using your roman keyboard. For example, type in “manush” and hit space button and the transliteration software will convert it to its corresponding Bangla in a unicode compliant font. To switch from Bangle to English (or vice versa), just press Ctrl+G (in Windows) or Cmd+G (in Mac OS). If the transliteration engine does not generate the word you want, just press the “back” or “delete” button, and it will provide you with multiple choices. The tool also offers you a dictionary that can provide you Bangla word equivalents for most English words. You can select the correct word and insert in the document.

However, this system is still in its infancy and has several limitations. For example, you cannot save the documents you create using this system. Currently Google transliteration is offered only in Gmail, Blogger, Knol and Bookmarklet. Even Google docs is not supported, let alone Microsoft Word or any other word processor. Choice of fonts is also limited. I hope Google is working on these issues and make transliteration a truly useful system. Till then we’ll have to work within these limitations.

Alexa ranking is now the defacto standard for determining web popularity – the less the rank number the higher is your popularity. For example Google has the highest rank – 1. Most online advertisers use Alexa rank as the key metric to decide whether to spend their precious advertising dollars on a site.

However, the way Alexa computes a sites rank is by measring how many visitors are viewing your site using a browser that has an Alexa tool bar installed. In other words, if a visitor do not have the Alexa tool bar installed, that visit does not count at all. Well, apparently there are are other variables used in computing the rank, but most webmasters and SEO pundits agree that the Alexa tool bar is the key instrumentation used in computing this elusive number.

The other less effective ways are things like, installing Alexa widgets on your site, increasing the number of incoming links, use techniques like posting on Asian forums (apparently Alexa is more popular in Asia) etc. Google the term “how to improve Alexa rank” and you’ll find tons of advice.

But I think the only way to make it work for you is to get tons of traffic to your site.

Want to search the web in Bengali for websites in Bengali? Visit google.co.in and select the language (Bengali) from the menu below the search window. Now type in your search keyword using your keyboard. Google uses a transliteration scheme to form the word in Bangla. It will also offer multiple options as you type in. Select your option, and voila’ – several Bangla websites will splash on your screen.

Anybody who is even the least interested in making money with their blog has done a google search this title phrase and have landed up with thousands of articles, posts, advertorials, videos and other material that provide a hash-up of few different techniques that can bring in the greens. But when you look at them with some curiosity, you’ll see that almost all off them give you a bullet list of techniques that can bring in traffic and can potentially bring in some dough. You’ll learn about SEO techniques to improve search engine rankings, you’ll know how important it is to have in-links to your site, you’ll discover what article marketing is, and how to effectively use the social networking and bookmarking sites (Facebook, Orkut, Del.icio.us, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc. etc.). You’ll know the benefits of enlisting your blog to multiple blog networks and directories, tricks to improve Alexa rankings and the secrets of setting up RSS feeds for potential subscribers. All these techniques are good and work to some degree to bring in traffic to your blog – but believe me, millions of bloggers are doing just the same. Traffic is king to any blogger, and whatever published technique exists today are being tried over and over again. The problem is that the search engines (google, yahoo etc) and traffic ranking sites (like Alexa) keep on changing their strategy frequently and hence many techniques become stale. Continue reading →

Google has announced a new service, Google Voice. In 2007 Google acquired GrandCentral, a phone management service, for $50+ million. Since then GrandCentral was almost forgotten. Now Google unveils the GrandCentral service as voice call service that can give Skype a run for their money. With Google Voice, a subscriber can have a single phone number and any call made to that number will be forwarded to all your phones – home, cell, office or your hotel room. Calls using Google Voice is free within USA. International calls will cost around 2 cents a minute. The other features include sending, receiving and storing text messages, listen-in feature to listen to calls before taking it, voice mail and voice mail transcript service that allows storing and archiving of voice mail messages as text and many other features.
Currently Google Voice service is available only to existing GrandCentral customers. But as soon as it does open its doors, it will surely cause a major dent to Skype and other similar services. Let’s just wait and see how it rolls out.